Anterograde amnesia in the media

     While reading the short story, Memento Mori, by Jonathan Nolan, I thought about the ways I've seen the condition of the "10-minute man" presented in the media. I've seen a few movies where the condition has been showcased and represents how different people learn to live with it. The first movie I'd ever seen where the main character had a variation of this condition was called 50 First Dates. It stars Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler as Barrymore's character, Lucy lives her days on repeat because she can remember one day's worth of information, but no more than that. 

    Every day, Lucy's slate is wiped clean like others' suffering from anterograde amnesia. In this movie, everyone around her changes their lives to ensure that Lucy doesn't find anything weird about her day. She lives every day like it's her Dad's birthday from a year ago when she had an accident. Everyone around her kept up the lie that every day was the same to not harm Lucy, but it hurt her more until Henry, Sandler's character, creates a way for her to grow into a marriage with him and have a family together. The moral of the story is that people with such disabilities can still have a fulfilling life with all the joy and chaos as a regular person. Maybe even more so, because every day they wake up and get to love their kids and husband all over again. Now Earl in Memento Mori and Sanjay in Ghajini disagree with the idea that one can live happily like this.

    Ghajini is a 2008 film based on the story of Memento Mori and its film adaption of Memento. Watch this clip from 3:20 to 4:40 to see how the life of a "ten-minute man" works. Characters in these works believe there is no way to live a normal life again and live only to avenge the death of a loved one. Later on in the scene, Sanjay, the man who was chasing the girl, figured out that she was the one he was chasing because he saw that they were both out of breath. Putting pieces together like this is a constant challenge for those with this form of amnesia because they cannot rely on the "normal" senses for guidance. 

    Sorry, there aren't many jokes in this week's blog, I just find this stuff really fascinating. The way these things are presented in the media is quite a mess. They're very strangely structured to give us an idea of what it's like to live inside the mind of a "10-minute man." In Ghajini, we rely on the testimony of Sanjay's journals, which the "friend" from earlier reads, from during the time that he was falling in love with his wife to learn what drove him to be the scary, unapproachable, vengeful man we see today. It's always a fight for the audience to get to see what happens next in the love story because Sanjay is always pushing people away who are trying to help him. Much like Leonard, in Memento, Sanjay is consumed with the drive to avenge his wife's murder until it's the only thing left of him. The brutal murder scene of Sanjay's wife comes near the end, followed by his final revenge on the man behind it all, Ghajini.

    In order to parallel the chaotic nature of the life of someone with anterograde amnesia, artistic pieces fill the audience's minds with details and events occurring out of order to parallel the way one must live with this disability. In 50 First Dates, they showered Lucy with a glorified life cushioning her from anything new, for a whole year, to prevent her from having to relive the incident of her car crash. The backward logic of this scenario presents the audience with the issue of trying to puppy-guard a person for their entire life. Whereas, Memento and Ghajini take on the role of using trauma and presenting it in awkward segments to keep the audience wanting more to tide them over and actually learn what is happening.